And yet another of my childhood heroes is gone. This time it is the one baseball player who was acclaimed as the best of all time, Wilie Mays. Back in the ‘60’s, he helped me to become a fan of the San Francisco Giants. I had migrated from being a fan of the New York Yankees (after all, they had Yogi Bear as a player), to the St. Louis Cardinals, in their heyday of the ‘60’s. But it was the Giants, with Mays, McCovey, and Marichal who captured my imagination. I still have a baseball glove that bears Bobby Bond’s signature.
To those who have a hard time imagining what being a baseball fan in the middle of the country in the 1960’s was like, put yourself in the position of only seeing one game a week on TV. Voices like Dizzy Dean and Pee Wee Reese broadcast the images directly to me. The beer ads that permeated the air waves bore images of Bears and an old pro for an unidentifiable sport. Ads for cars featured people like Dinah Shore entreating us to “see the USA, in our Chevrolet”. Then came the game. I remember pitching matchups like Marichal and Gibson, Juan with his signature high kick, and Gibson just being dominant. Above all, there was the grace and power of Willie Mays, who could overcome the winds of Candlestick to blast another homer. I was too young to argue who was the best center fielder in New York – Snider, or Mantle, or Mays. When I became aware of baseball, the moves to the West Coast were fait accompli. So I never knew the Dodgers or the Giants as New York teams, they belonged to the West Coast. But they were featured prominently on “The Game of the Week”.
I have often wondered how Marichal would fare if he tried to use that leg kick today. When coaches are measuring the hundredths of a second for a ball to get to the catcher, those few extra moments where the leg went up to the sky would seem a useless luxury. But for the batter, who didn’t know what type of pitch was coming his way, that high leg kick was just part of the agony of waiting.
There is a feeling that things were so much better back in the past. Surely we were watching baseball at its peak. But I just saw a game this week which brought me back to those images I remember so well. It was Keller vs. Greene, and the game was scoreless into the 8th inning. Mitch Keller reminds me of Marichal, having such a wide array of pitches, and seemingly he will be the one to complete the most games during each year. The only thing I can say about the decline of the game is that the supporting cast for the team’s stars may not be as strong as it was in the ‘60’s, with people like Hart, and Cepeda, and McCovey being replaced by those who seem to struggle to reach the Mendoza line. It would be inconceivable to have regulars in a line-up who bat below .200 back in the olden days. Now? With pitching so dominant, and with home runs being so venerated, it is the strike-out that seems more frequent than ever. It used to be an anomaly to strike out over 100 times in a year. Now? It is becoming rare to see someone strike out fewer than 100 times over the course of a season.
There are a few today who approach the level of a Mays. Aaron Judge seems capable of putting seasons together with similar statistics. It is only when you realize that Mays kept up a level of excellence for two decades that you become able to place Willy properly among the luminaries of baseball. And I do remember the last two years back with the Mets, where it was obvious that the athleticism had waned. Just like for me, where I came into the world on the day that Willy Mays made “The Catch”, I can feel my powers fading a bit as I near the 70th anniversary of my own birth.
But I guess part of the charm of baseball is the endless arguments about the players of the current age vs. those of your youth. They always were a reflection of your own youth, and just as they embodied virility and endless possibility, you took on a share of their vitality as part of your own. Now? Baseball is just too slow to capture the attention of today’s youth, since it requires you to spend actual time watching innings in order to have any appreciation for the game. My only thought is at least a bat flip will match the typical Instagram attention span.
Even A Broken Clock 